In-depth, sourced stories of the world's most remarkable discoveries: lost cities, ancient technology, buried armies and the people who found them.
10 stories
No. 004 · Ancient cities
In 1963, a resident of Derinkuyu in central Turkey broke through a wall in his house and found a passage leading down into a vast underground city, carved out of soft volcanic rock and big enough to shelter thousands of people.
No. 002 · Art and artifacts
In September 1940, four teenagers squeezed through a hole in a French hillside and found a cave covered with paintings of horses, bulls and deer, made around 17,000 years ago. Their discovery was so popular it nearly destroyed the cave.
No. 006 · Ancient cities
In July 1911, a Yale lecturer named Hiram Bingham climbed a jungle ridge in Peru and found Inca ruins of astonishing quality. He was guided there by local people, and two farming families were already living among the terraces.
No. 005 · Ancient cities
In AD 79, Vesuvius buried Pompeii and Herculaneum under ash and pumice. Seventeen centuries later, royal diggers began tunnelling into them, and a 19th-century archaeologist found a way to give shape to the people who died there.
No. 003 · Ancient technology
In 1900, a storm drove Greek sponge divers to a tiny island, where they found a Roman-era shipwreck. Among the statues was a corroded lump of bronze that turned out to be a geared machine for predicting the sky, built more than 2,000 years ago.
No. 010 · Art and artifacts
In the winter of 1946 to 1947, Bedouin shepherds climbed into a cave above the Dead Sea and found clay jars holding ancient scrolls. Over the next decade, eleven caves gave up the remains of some 900 manuscripts, including the oldest known copies of books of the Hebrew Bible.
No. 017 · Ancient technology
In a courtyard beside the Qutb Minar stands an iron column made around AD 400 that has stood in the open for centuries with little rust. The explanation turned out to be chemistry, not magic.
No. 009 · Art and artifacts
In July 1799, French soldiers rebuilding a fort near Rashid pulled an inscribed stone out of a wall. It carried the same decree in three scripts, and it set off a 23-year race to read the writing of the pharaohs.
No. 001 · Buried treasures
In 1974, farmers looking for water near Xi'an hit fragments of clay. They had found the edge of an army of more than 8,000 life-size soldiers, buried for over 2,000 years to guard China's first emperor.
No. 013 · Buried treasures
In November 1922, after years of finding almost nothing, Howard Carter's team uncovered a step cut into the rock of the Valley of the Kings. It led to the most complete royal tomb ever found in Egypt, and to a curse legend that has never quite gone away.